Low Carb Sausage and Spinach Soup

It doesn't seem possible that over two years have passed since the last time I posted on this blog. Anyhow, today I did an experiment that came out good so I thought I would share.

1 lb of pork sausage
10 oz frozen chopped spinach
1/2 cup chopped onion or fennel
1 tbsp olive oil
2 quarts turkey or chicken broth
1/4 cup almond flour
1/4 cup Greek yogurt

Warm a dutch oven and add the olive oil Cook the sausage and onion or fennel until the sausage is brown.

Sprinkle the almond flour over the sausage and stir for a minute or two.

Add the broth and the spinach and bring to a simmer.

Stir in the Greek yogurt.

Simmer on low for 30 minutes.

The almond flour doesn't thicken like regular flour does, but it does add a little body to the broth. I happened to have some turkey bone broth in the fridge so I used that, diluted with water. The sausage was seasoned and I didn't think that any additional salt, pepper or herbs were needed.

Perfect for a cold, windy November day! Enjoy!

God's Good Gifts - Mushrooms

This AM I watched a cooking show called "The Art of Food" about mushrooms, and it reminded me of my blog series about God's good gifts. The mushroom has been my trademark since Junior High, mainly because it's about the only thing I can draw that is recognizable! I love the classic mushroom look and when we first got married in 1980, we received many mushroom themed gifts.

The cooking show today featured wild and domestic mushrooms, some I had never heard of before, and I was struck with how this funny little object can add such flavor to food. Some mushrooms also have medicinal value. Of course, I can't ignore two other negative qualities - poison and hallucenogenic. So - stick to the mushrooms you find at the grocery store and you won't go astray!

Boxing Day Soup

We had Christmas at our house twice this year, so had lots of food to deal with after the last get-together. (I'm not complaininag!) I don't have a picture of the soup I made, but here are the appetizer trays that provided most of the soup ingredients. 

Brocolli
Cauliflower
Cherry Tomatoes
Bell Pepper
Onion
Baby Carrots
Mushrooms
Olive oil
Carbquik (low carb baking mix) (could use any type of flour or thickener)
Heavy Cream
Chicken Soup base
Turkey Broth
Water
Salt & Pepper
Summer Sausage
Cheese

Roast all your raw veggies by tossing them in olive oil and putting them in a 425 oven for 40 minutes.

Meanwhile, make a roux by heating 3 tablespoons of olive oil with 3 tablespoons of carbquik or other thickener.

Stir in several quarts of chicken broth. (I made mine with boiling water and chicken soup base. Also added some turkey broth I had in the freezer.)

Add the roasted veggies. Use a stick blender to puree. I left it chunky.

I had cooked mushrooms and onions that I added after pureeing. I also had a Hickory Farms summer sausage that I diced and added.

I also had a lot of cheese cubes of various flavors, so I cut them into tiny pieces and melted them into the soup.

The final touch was some heavy cream and salt & pepper. At that point I left it on simmer for around an hour to allow all the flavors to blend.

YUM!

Bok Choy Chopped Salad

Yesterday I made a lap around the local farmer's market and came home with some beautiful hydroponic bok choy from Bolton Farms. Tonight I turned it into a chopped salad and we both loved it!

Here's the recipe:

Chop the following to bite size:

1 bunch bok choy
1 medium apple
1/2 peeled cucumber
1/4 green pepper
1 tomato
1/4 cup walnuts (toasted or warmed in the microwave)
handful of pea shoots
ham (I used 4 or 5 slices of honey ham)
grated parmesan

Dressing: (I put this in a small jar and shook it until combined)

1/4 cup olive oil
1/8 cup pear balsamic ( got this at Tasteful Additions)
1 teaspoon dijon mustard
squirt of whipped cream

Pour the dressing over the salad ingredients and toss.

We split this in half and had it for supper. I think it would also work as a side salad and would probably make 6 to 8 servings.

I think this recipe could serve as a basic pattern for a chopped salad and the ingredient combinations are only limited by your imagination.

Enjoy!!!

"I Bought Too Much at the Farmer's Market Vegetable Soup"

Last week I was trying to bring order out of chaos in the fridge. I dragged out all the produce and it was immediately obvious that there was no way two people could eat all that veg before it went bad. So, out came the cutting board, the knife, and the 16 quart pot. Here's what went in:

brussel sprouts
bok choy
savoy cabbage (1/2 a head)
red cabbage (1/2 a head)
baby carrots
celery
cauliflower (1/2 a head)
shallot
(I can't remember - but maybe an onion and some garlic)

All veg was chopped into bite sized pieces and sauteed in some olive oil. After things started to soften up, I added 2 quarts of frozen turkey broth (recipe posted on the blog as "Blue's Soup". Then I added another 2 quarts of water that I had boiled in the tea kettle.

After the pot got close to a boil I added 1 cup of quinoa, put on the lid and simmered it for 30 minutes.

At the very end I added some kosher salt and some black pepper until it passed the taste test with Little Man's father.

I was afraid it might smell cabbage-y, but the end result smelled and tasted wonderful! I put a lot of it into the freezer right away, but what I kept in the fridge thickened up nicely and tasted even better on day 2 and 3.

Cranberry-Pineapple Jello

Yesterday in an attempt to clean out the pantry and fridge, I tried a new recipe and was happy with the results. I had cherry and strawberry sugar free jello and a bag of tired cranberries. The recipe I came up with on the internet called for a can of cranberry sauce, so the first thing I did was wash the cranberries, pick out the bad ones, then cook what was left with equal parts water and sugar. The recipe on the package called for 1 cup of water to 12 oz. of cranberries. I used 2/3 cup water and 2/3 cup sugar, brought it to a boil and cooked it for 10 minutes.

Here's the recipe:

6 oz of red jello ( I used a 3 oz cherry and a 3 oz strawberry)
2 cups boiling water
20 oz can of crushed pineapple - drained (reserve the liquid)
Can of cranberry sauce or 1 bag of cranberries cooked per the sauce recipe on the package.

Put the jello in a bowl and add 2 cups boiling water. Stir until dissolved.
Add the cranberry sauce
Add cold water to the pineapple juice to bring it to 2 cups - add to the bowl.
Stir in the pineapple.

Chill until set.

I think this would be a nice way to incorporate cranberries into a turkey dinner.

New Twist on Apple Crisp

Yesterday I made the apple crisp recipe I posted on June 2, 2010. However, this time I made it gluten-free on behalf of a friend at church who is gluten intolerant. Apparently rolled oats could have small amounts of gluten due to their place of processing, so I bought some gluten-free oats. I substituted tapioca flour for regular flour. And I checked online and the brand of brown sugar I used (Aldi's baker's corner) is gluten free. The rest of the ingredients (apples, butter, cinnamon, nutmeg) are not a problem. The result was delicious (if I do say so myself!) and I couldn't detect any difference in the taste to the original recipe.

Kickin' Split Pea Soup

Here is the recipe for today's experiment in Split Pea Soup (which was my attempt to copy the seasoning package that comes with Healthy Sisters "June's Split Pea Soup". (Healthy Sisters is a great local organization that helps women in recovery. Their soups are wonderful and you can read about them here.)

1 package split peas
4 cups chicken broth
4 cups water
1.5 cups roughly chopped celery
1.5 cups roughly diced carrots
1 small onion chopped
1 tsp. thyme
2 bay leaves
1-2 tblsps. southwest sizzle seasoning
1-2 drops hot sauce ( I used Kick Yo Ass' "Ass-Kickin' Roasted Garlic Hot Sauce")
1 tsp. kosher salt
6 grinds black pepper
1 tsp cayenne pepper
1 tsp. celery seed
10 oz. Hickory Farms summer sausage - diced

Rinse the split peas with cold water. Warm the chicken stock and water in the microwave. Place all the ingredients except the sausage into a dutch oven and cover. Place into a 350 degree oven for 2 hours.

After 2 hours, add the sausage and cook for another 30 minutes.

Little Man's Father asked for seconds, so I guess it was a success!

Aldi's Convert

I have dabbled with shopping at Aldi's over the years. After doing the bulk of my Thanksgiving shopping at Aldi's, I'm a full-fledged convert! There aren't a zillion choices,which cuts down on decision making. For most items it is take it or leave it!

Here are some of the bargains:

Butterball Turkey - $.99/lb.
Butter - $1.99/lb.
Ocean Spray Cranberries - $.99/bag (it was $2/bag at Wegman's)
Cream Cheese - $.89/8 oz. package
Choceur Truffles - $2.49/bag (treat for the cook! compare to Lindt - yum!)

So far, all the food items we have tried have been a good quality. About the only thing I've ever purchased that I wouldn't bother with again was the dish soap. It was wimpy. I really like the Lacura lip balm, lipstick and face powder.

So, bring a quarter for the shopping cart and put your tote bags in the car and prepare to save some $$$.

Vegetable Broth

Last night we made vegetable broth using the recipe from Brother Victor-Antoine's book "Twelve Months of Monastery Soups". Yum!

God's Good Gifts - Honey

My son, eat honey, for it is good, and the drippings of the honeycomb are sweet to your taste. Proverbs 24:13 (ESV)

Honey or honeycomb occurs in the Bible 61 times! The majority of these verses are descriptions of the promised land, flowing with milk & honey, indicating God's abundant provision.

Like coffee & tea, I wonder who was the first person to decide to brave stinging insects and taste the gooey stuff in their nest and discover that it tasted good? Somewhere back in the dawn of time, God guided our ancestors to discover honey and all it's beneficial properties - culinary, medicinal and cosmetic. Google honey and be amazed at its history and properties!

God's Good Gifts - Coffee

Every day starts with coffee! Usually I have about 1 1/2 cups, then switch to tea. if I know there's no tea in the offing, then I have a little more. When I first started drinking coffee back in college I put in 3 (!) teaspoons of sugar. I finally decided I had to learn to either learn to drink it black or give it up, so after a few months of making a face every time I took a sip, I finally learned to love it straight out of the pot. Coffee is another one of those daily gifts from God that I am thankful for.

Quite a while ago, the homemaker's club I belonged to had a guest speaker. This man had been downsized from a very good job, so he took early retirement and followed his dream and opened a coffee roasting shop. This was back when fancy coffee shops were just beginning to pop up. His talk took us from planting to brewing and every step in between and gave me a whole new appreciation of what goes into a cup of coffee. There's such a fine line between light, medium, dark or ruined!

For a while, we would buy our beans whole and grind them daily. The novelty of that has long since worn off, so now I buy ground coffee, which tastes just fine to me. We especially like Gevalia but since it is so pricey, tend to only fix it on weekends or when we have company over. Dunkin Donuts has great coffee but even it has become quite expensive lately. Good old Sam's Club has their own brand that quite nice.

God's Good Gifts - Tea

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. James 1:17 (ESV)

The other day as I was driving around (and around and around!) on the lawnmower, I started thinking about some of God's gifts, so I thought I'd write about some of them, in no particular order.

Today, I'm thinking of tea. Who thought of taking a leaf, curing it, and then putting it in hot water to make a drink? And which leaf? And how long to dry it, ferment it, or whatever? I just googled tea, and the wikipedia article alone is huge, not to mention all the various tea sellers and their sites. Anyhow, I think that a naturally occuring plant that can be made into such an enjoyable and healthy drink qualifies as a gift from God, one for which I am very thankful.

Tea is THE most popular drink in the world, and is definitely high on my list, right after water. Almost every day, I fix myself a small pot of tea early and enjoy it all morning, at work or at home. Twining's Prince of Wales variety is my absolute favorite, but I also enjoy trying others. Another one that is lovely is Orange Blossom oolong from Tealightful Treasures. I indulge in loose tea sometimes (but have learned to use the paper tea sacs, which make clean up much easier - sorry, I'm not a purist!) but really appreciate the convenience of tea bags. Most afternoons I have a large mug of herbal tea and during the cold months, another cup of chamomile tea is a treat in the evening.

This past Christmas I received some mint tea. I always avoided mint tea in the past, but this was really good, so I've been on a mint kick lately.

I've loved tea for years, but am happy to see it growing in popularity. Hot, iced, caffeinated, herbal - thank you Lord for this blessing!

Blue's Soup (akaTurkey Broth Recipe)

Way back in the dark ages (probably late 1980's) before the internet, we bought our first computer, a Zenith with an amber screen. (It's still in the attic!) I had a trial membership with Prodigy, an early on-line group, and I had met some nice pen pals there. At one time I wrote that I was trying to make soup and it was boring and tasteless. I received the following recipe from someone who's screen name was Blue, and I have used it successfully for years. Usually I use it with a turkey carcass.

Blue's Soup

Put whatever (turkey, chicken, ham bone) into the soup pot and cover with water. Add salt (1/2 tbsp), 5 grinds pepper, 1/4 cup onions (dried, minced, ground to powder), garlic (enough to fit in center of hand), same amounts of parsley, sage, ground rosemary (poultry only), thyme, hyssop (note - I've never had any of this) and marjoram. Add 3 stalks celery minced, or 1/2 tbsp celery salt, 1 grated carrot.

Cook until meat falls off bones. Strain.

Usually I end there and freeze the results for future use. The recipe goes on to say: re-season again using the same amounts of everything except salts. Add veggies, simmer 1 hour.

Spring Ahead Soup

Yesterday's kitchen mission was to cook or compost all the vegetables in the kitchen. The end result was "Spring Ahead Soup".

First, I lined a large roasting pan with foil and put in baby carrots and cut up turnips, green pepper, cauliflower and onion. I coated it all with some olive oil and roasted it at 425 degrees for 40 minutes, tossing it after 20 minutes.

In another lined roasting pan, I put in cut up broccoli and leeks. I roasted them for 400 degrees for 20 minutes.

I dumped in all the roasted vegetables into a large pot and added water to cover. I also added a frozen batch of turkey broth and a fork-full of chicken soup base. I heated it all and then pureed it with an immersion blender.

Because the turkey broth has seasonings and the chicken soup base has salt, it did not need any other seasoning. The end result tasted good and yielded about 7 quarts of soup.

Lettuce & Leek Soup

I've been on a Brother Victor-Antoine d'Avila-Latourrette kick lately. We have his "Twelve Months of Monastery Soups" cookbook. He's been busy since then and our library system has quite a few books by him. His latest is called "Sacred Feasts from a Monastery Kitchen". He's been practicing and promoting "eat local and seasonal" for years, long before it became the trendy thing to do. I enjoy reading the explanations that go along with his recipes describing life in a monastery and how it revolves around the liturgical year.

His green soups particularly caught my eye and I've been thinking about them lately. The recipe below is based very loosely on a couple of his recipes. It is also based on a google of lettuce soup this AM before I got busy trying to use up what I had purchased at the public market last Saturday. In addition to this soup, this AM I made beef vegetable soup and a low carb picadillo from Dana Carpender. Both the ground beef and the beef soup bone came from a local farm that sells grass-fed beef. Yummy!

Leek & Lettuce Soup

3 leeks - chopped
3 cloves garlic - smashed

Cook in olive oil until limp.

Add - 1 cup turkey broth and about a quart of water with a tablespoon of chicken soup base.

Then add the lettuces - chopped. Today I had arugula, watercress and mixed greens. I also added some chopped fresh basil leaves. Cook until limp.

Add fresh chopped parsley and cook for about 5 more minutes.

Whiz all of the above in the blender along with about 1/2 cup of plain yogurt. (Today's yogurt also came from the public market - Jersey cow yogurt - YUM!)

Add salt to taste. I used about a tablespoon of kosher salt.

Honey Mustard Dip

Our local grocery store had samples before Thanksgiving, and one of them was for Bison's new Honey Mustard Dip. It is delicious! Last night I decided to try and make something similar and found this recipe on-line at everydaycook.com:

1/2 cup sour cream
3 tablespoons whole-grain mustard
3 tablespoons honey

Just whisk everything together. I eye-balled the ingredients and it come out great. I would like to try it with dijon mustard also sometime. this is my kind of recipe - cheap, easy, delicious. Enjoy!

Today's Roasting Experiment

Today's attempt to clean up the fridge reinforced my premise that you can't go wrong with roasted vegetables. I cut up plum tomatoes that were starting to look tired, some red peppers, a green pepper and part of a zuchinni (the rest was definitely too tired). I also added an onion. Everything was cut in chunks. Then I sprinkled garlic powder (because I ran out of garlic cloves), basil, oregano, and rosemary and drizzled olive oil over all. It roasted in a 400 degree oven for about 40 minutes. I reached in a couple of times and gave it a stir. (Also, I lined the pan with foil - easy on the dishwasher [aka-yours truly]).

Meanwhile, I put 2 jars of plain spaghetti sauce that we had received in a gift basket into the slow cooker. When the veggies were done I dumped them in, juices and all, and let it warm up and bubble for a few hours.

The final touch was some low carb meatballs. I adapted this recipe from one I found on line:

2 lbs ground beef
2 beaten eggs
3/4 cups parmesan cheese
1 tsp garlic powder
1 tsp onion powder

Mix all of the above together and roll into golf ball sized balls. Place on a baking sheet (use foil for easy clean-up) and bake at 375 degrees for 25 minutes.

I put 12 meatballs into the sauce and put the rest into the freezer for future use.

Some cooking show I watched recently said to work the ground beef gently and not squash it together, so I stirred it with a fork and used a light touch on rolling the balls. I thought they came out good - not too hard or dense.

I had a box of Dreamfields Rotini in the cupboard, so that's what we enjoyed the sauce on. Little Man's Father liked it and so did I!

Chicken and Leek Soup

I made this soup this week in an effort to use up some leftover chicken and some very tired leeks and it came out better than I ever expected.

Chicken broth - I used chicken soup base from Sam's Club, using about half the recommended amount. (ex. if it calls for 1 tsp per cup of water, I use 1/2 tsp., etc.)

Chicken - I had a cooked boneless chicken breast and a little bit of rotisserie chicken, so I cut it all up into bite-sized pieces.

Leeks - I cut these into bite-sized pieces, tossed them in some olive oil and roasted them at 400 degrees for about 30 minutes until they were tender.

I combined all of the above and heated it to "eatin' temperature". Little Man's Father raved about it. Mission accomplished!!!

Chicken Rice Soup

I made this soup for this year's hypertufa party and was very pleased with the end result.

Chicken broth - I used chicken soup base from Sam's Club, using half the recommended amount. (ex.-if it calls for 1 tsp per cup of water, I use 1/2 tsp.) I think any chicken broth or stock would be fine.

Rice - I cooked a batch of basmati rice in the microwave per the directions on the package.

Chicken - I bought a rotisserie chicken from Sam's Club and pulled all the meat off it.

Vegetables - I chopped up carrots, celery and onions and roasted them in the oven in some olive oil - 400 degrees for about 20-30 minutes until they were tender.

I combined all of the above together in a large pot, brought it to a simmer, then left it on the burner on low for 3-4 hours until lunch time. A crockpot would also work well.